Replacing the hated “warp drive”

It's been a pet peeve of mine for years. I researched for years to find a way around it, and wrote two books based on my solution. It's one of the things that threatens to turn a perfectly good science fiction story to fantasy in an instant. It's warp drive. And I hate it.

Warp drive was a concept created by writers of science fiction who knew that the distances between stars were too immense to allow humans to travel about and actually live to reach the other side. It provided for romantic stories about traveling from star to star as easily as we sail from shore to shore, in great and powerful ships run by military discipline much like their seafaring ancestors. It gave us Forbidden Planet, which begat Star Trek, and the "new planet every week" television show.

And yes, I've done it myself. One of my most popular series, The Kestral Voyages, applies a warp drive system much like that featured on Star Trek, giving me a Galarchy of planets and a commercial network for my heroes to ply the stars. Lots of room for romantic adventure. Easy. Familiar. Understandable.

The problem is, it's a crock. It won't work. Why? Because, however you plan to do it, it would require more power than any human-built construct could ever hold, or any engine could ever process. We're talking on the order of stellar energy outputs every second... except that, wait, even that's not enough. And you wouldn't be able to see ahead of you... or detect and move unexpected obstacles before you run right into them. It's suicidal as well as impossible.

Most SF writers know this... or they choose to ignore it. Some of them may believe that, like the sound barrier, we just have to push hard enough to "break through" it and the rest is cake. Others like to believe that yes, we can commandeer the power required to move faster than light, once we figure out how to control anti-matter or zero-point energy. Some think we can gain the ability to control time, or to insert our ships into "hyperspace," another dimension that allows you to travel to other planets but by a shorter route (because, in hyperspace, everything is apparently much closer together). Some delight in filling pages with jargon that pretends to solve the inherent impossibilities of the task. And some just like to say "Ah, what the hell... warp speed, Scotty!" and ignore the contradictions and impossibilities inherent in what they're doing. (In terms of the Kestral books, that last writer is me.)

It's a cheap literary shortcut, as clich&#233; as the cavalry coming over the hill in the nick of time and the detective who never gets hit by a fusillade of bullets, but hits his mark and downs his crook with one shot every time. And readers who wouldn't accept elves and unicorns in their stories open wide and swallow warp drives whole, then mumble "Thank you sir, may I have another?" through jargon-stuffed mouths.

So why do we do it? Is it impossible to write science fiction without resorting to that stereotypically-impossible trope? And is it impossible for readers to appreciate a story without it? I don't think so; it's just that it's been with us for so long, we don't really see it anymore. It's become a sort of blind spot, the ever-present cowboy hat on the hero's head, part of the landscape.

And it self-supports a certain type of story, like a tree on a hill that can threaten the hero with a hanging—how can you threaten to hang the hero if there are no trees? If we want to write a story in which the hero is threatened with hanging, it's just too easy to write in some trees somewhere.

When I decided to write a realistic SF story taking place in space, I researched possibilities of traveling among the stars that didn't involved fictional alternate dimensions and impossible amounts of power; something that actually seemed plausible.

As a long-time reader of Scientific American, I struggle my way through most of the articles involving one aspect or another of quantum physics on a regular basis. To be honest, not a few of them left me in the dust, and many others left as many questions as they answered (assuming I even knew what the questions were!). But I managed to slog through most every article that tied quantum physics into the makeup of our universe… and suddenly, certain things started to add up. I went back through my magazines, re-read articles, started taking notes, and Lo and Behold, a possible method of intergalactic travel suitable for believable science fiction began to suggest itself!

The concept that the universe has a “quantum frequency,” unique at every distance from the center of the universe, is borrowed from the Scientific American June 2005 article entitled “Inconstant Constants.” It identifies a Fine Structure Constant (alpha), which defines the strengths of the interactions of elementary particles, and which suggests different interactions at different degrees of alpha… in other words, a unique frequency at any specific radius from universal center. This is a function (one among many) of the expanding universe around us.

This detail meshes well with the Hubble constant, which indicates that the universe is expanding faster where it is further away from universal center than it is closer in. The differing expansion rates cause measurable changes in light frequencies, creating a seeming paradox of objects that, from our point of view, can travel “faster than light.” These observations are described in the Scientific American March 2005 article “Misconceptions About the Big Bang.”

These, and lesser articles in SciAm and other sources, were my basis for the “quantum frequency” that a signal-broadcasting system could manipulate on a local level, essentially altering the frequency of anything within its influence.

Couple this with many experiments in accelerating quantum particles, resulting in their “disappearance” from one position and “reappearance” in another position. In these experiments, the quantum particles seem to traverse a distance faster than light could travel. Don’t ask me how any scientist manages to tell one quantum particle from another, but they are certain these particles are one and the same… meaning that they are covering a distance faster than light. Most scientists believe they are traveling through another dimension, in an effect they call “quantum tunneling.”

I tied “quantum frequency” and “quantum tunneling” together by suggesting that quantum particles, having a new quantum frequency forced upon them, will automatically “tunnel” to the distance from universal center that corresponds to that quantum frequency. The demonstrated effect of “quantum entanglement” suggests that, if the particles all “tunnel” at the same time, they will maintain position and state with each other, resulting in a collection of particles arriving in the same overall state as when they departed.

The concept of a "jump drive" creates a very different dynamic for a space story: No longer do the characters sail a vast, black ocean between stars, like their ancestors did back on Earth; they now set some equipment, flip a switch and they're there. The tropes of long isolated voyages and vast distances common to stories in our past no longer apply. The old romance is gone.

But that's okay: We know how to make new romances. Science fiction is about investigating and revealing the differences in our lives that science will one day bring upon us. In the same ways that we interact, communicate, work, play, learn and maintain ourselves differently with the help of scientific discoveries, so we can expect to travel differently through space. The rebooted Battlestar Galactica showed us a jump drive, and a way of life built around it, and it was not sterile or boring. It was different... the essence of science fiction.

We can stop treating space stories as extensions of Horatio Hornblower, and imagine them in a new way, a world that doesn't depend on the old notions of travel, and invents brand new ones. It's time to leave the old centuries' notions behind, and see where the new centuries will take us.

I would disagree on these points. Before we landed on the moon it was perfectly feasible according to the current science of the day. (well understood Newtonian Physics) All that was needed was the political will to make it possible.

Similarly now we do not have lunar colonies, or a ship capable of a manned landing on mars for that matter. Both are easily within our technolgical grasp, but we do not have the political will to build them.

Not being willing to do something is not the same as not being able to do something. We could pour our whole planet's treasure into building a warp drive have nothing to show because the science is not understood and may never be. We could be on the Moon or Mars in short order if there was the money available.

Note that this board does not allow links to one's own personal blog. If a point is worth making, they ask that we make it on the board itself (and yes, this is in contradiction to every other message board ever, which allows it and it's fine, but that's how SFFWorld rolls).

That said, any kind of FTL or lightspeed-circumventing device (both are effectively the same) is as much of a crock as another, whether it's done from a quantum perspective or not. In fact, for all of its crockness, the Star Trek warp drive (known in real theoretical physics, if you pardon the paradox, as the Alcubierre drive) is more plausible than most proposed solutions, which tend to rely on laws of physics that we do not yet understand or even know for sure exists. Warp drive requires bending all sorts of existing laws and more energy than exists in a supernova, but at least has some kind of (very) vague basis in reality.

To be frank, if writers want to 'keep it real', they should do what Reynolds does in Pushing Ice and the Revelation Space trilogy by outlawing all FTL travel altogether and solely using relativity to get from star to star in a few weeks (from the traveller's point of view, whilst years pass outside the ship).

Note that this board does not allow links to one's own personal blog. If a point is worth making, they ask that we make it on the board itself (and yes, this is in contradiction to every other message board ever, which allows it and it's fine, but that's how SFFWorld rolls).

Sorry. I looked and did not find that in the subject guidelines. If the moderators prefer, I'll be glad to paste the entire posting here.

Originally Posted by Werthead

Warp drive requires bending all sorts of existing laws and more energy than exists in a supernova, but at least has some kind of (very) vague basis in reality.

It was the bending that always bothered me: For instance, creating the time-warp bubble wherein the ship would travel, and of course, the energy requirement. I always wanted something that sounded like something we could understand, and have a chance of pulling off, given today's physics knowledge. And quantum tunneling and entanglement have both been demonstrated in the lab.

I would disagree on these points. Before we landed on the moon it was perfectly feasible according to the current science of the day. (well understood Newtonian Physics) All that was needed was the political will to make it possible.

Politicians do engineering. Now that is science fiction.

You can BELIEVE it is possible until it is done, but you can't KNOW it's possible until it is done.

Who knew about the Van Allen belts until an sensor pack was sent up to detect them? What if they had been so intense that people could not survive going through them. It would not be just a matter of Newtonian physics.

I expected people to challenge the idea of dismissing faster-than-light travel, and even my solution to get around it. I didn't really expect comments that seem to dismiss what we do know in physics... for instance, the evidence that no particle can travel faster than light (or lack of evidence for any particle that can travel FTL). Believing that we just haven't yet discovered faeries and magic doesn't mean they exist. Believing we just haven't discovered time-warp fields doesn't mean we'll someday create one.

Of course, my method uses elements we may never invent, as well. I just say my method is more likely and practical than FTL travel.

My main point, of course, was actually the idea that it's the old, romantic conventions that we need to examine, and in many cases to recognize if we are keeping them, however impractical, simply because they are romantic.

I expected people to challenge the idea of dismissing faster-than-light travel, and even my solution to get around it. I didn't really expect comments that seem to dismiss what we do know in physics... for instance, the evidence that no particle can travel faster than light (or lack of evidence for any particle that can travel FTL).

Is there evidence that no particle can travel faster than light or that it takes an infinite amount of energy to get a particle to the speed of light?

It wasn't until around 2000 that it was discovered that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing. Who ever imagined such a thing? There is still unknown physics out there.

WHAT IS SCIENCE?

A lot of people regard science as the body of knowledge that we have accumulated so far.

Another definition is the process by which unknown things about reality are figured out and that body of knowledge is just what science has been used to figure out so far.

But we don't know what has not been figured out yet. Hopefully there are still things that we have not found that need to be figured out. Too many people act like what we know is all there is. There is no question that the majority of what sci-fi writers imagine will never correspond to reality. I really just object to them getting known science wrong. There probably is no hyperspace. But we don't KNOW that there is no hyperspace. So I have no complaint about some SF author using hyperspace to do an effective FTL but I expect him to get his Newtonian Physics correct in Normal Space.

Steven, I have to agree with you about the Jump drive being the logical way of getting around the galaxy.

In fact it is the method I have been using for the past 9 years in the stories I write for the teenage youngsters of several of my friends. OK many of them are no longer teens but they arrive every year at the start of the holidays expecting me to have at least two new stories for them, then just before the end of their holiday we have several hours together discussing the stories and particularly the science and engineering in them.

The idea of the jump drive developed from one of them asking about controlled probability as a way of getting about which then went to quantum physics and the possibility of places in different solar systems having equal quantum potential and the jump drive was born.

My main point, of course, was actually the idea that it's the old, romantic conventions that we need to examine, and in many cases to recognize if we are keeping them, however impractical, simply because they are romantic.

But many people already did away with the 'sailing through the void at FTL' idea. Either by using only slower than light speed travel either with or without FTL communication (Reynolds, Stross, Egan, Morgan, most generation ship stories), or using (quantum) jump travel (Hamilton, more people I cannot think of right now) etc.. Probably even WH40k fits into this category.

But of course the more methods and the more modes of storytelling the better.